Plan of Letters on Tasks of the Revolutionary Youth

Written:August-September 1903Published:First published in 1924 inKrasnaya Molodyozhmagazine, No. 1.

      Published according to the manuscript.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      publisher??,1964,

      Moscow,Volume 7,

      pages41-42.Translated:Fineberg AbrahamTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaandD. WaltersCopyleft:V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marxists.org)
      © 2002

      Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the
      terms of theGNU Free Documentation License.Other
	  Formats:

Lettersontasks of the revolutionary youthcould be
      arranged on the following plan:

I.What the present-day student body consists of and what the
      task of achieving its ideological unity involves.

II.Importance of Marxism in revolutionising the students (in
      the revolutionary movement).

III.Social-Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries in
      Russia. Theoretical and tactical differences between
      them. Terrorism.

IV.Problems of student organisation from the standpoint of
      “revolutionising the students”.

V.Students and the working class (?).

{Ideological unity= a certain lack of ideological
      principles. General argument—different groups among the
      students. Analyse—what groups, their accidental or
      inevitable character.

Upliftersin different classes of society.

Upliftersas basis of liberals.

Classcharacter of the six groups insufficiently distinct:
autocracy the chief determining factor (reactionaries—
      uplifters—liberals). Petty bourgeoisie, workers,
      bourgeoisie—c l a s s[1]groupingsalready beginning to take shape.

Progressivesignificance of class (and political)
      differentiation.Example. Academics and their
      differentiation from“liberals”. This differentiation does not
      hinder but helps political utilisation (development, growth).

“Ideologicalunity”.Quid

	est?[2]Between
	whom? Academics + liberals?
	Liberals + socialists?

OnlySocialist-Revolutionaries and Social-Democrats?

Achievingideological unity=propagating definite ideas,clarifyingclass differences, effecting ideological
      demarcation.

Achievingideological unity = propagating ideasthat can lead
      forward, the ideas of the progressive class.

RevolutionaryMarxism, its emergence in Europe before
      1848, its role in Western Europe and Russia.

{i n s e r t: about the“superkluge"[3]contention that bourgeois students cannot become imbued with
      socialism. }

[1]Not “newly emerged” (the socialist
	intelligentsia), but going back half a century, beginning with
	the Petrashevsky

	circle,[4]approximately. —Lenin

[2]What is it?—Ed.

[3]“Over-clever.”–Ed. —Lenin

[4]ThePetrashevsky circlewas a group of progressive-minded
      commoner-intellectuals formed in St. Petersburg in the mid-forties of the
      last
      century around M. V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky, a fol lower of the French
      utopian socialist Fourier. Among the members were writers, teachers,
      students, minor government officials, army officers, and so on. While not
      uniform in their political views, most of them were opponents of the tsarist
      autocracy and the serf system.

Amongthose connected with the Petrashevsky circle were the writers
      Dostoyevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin and the poets Pie shcheyev, Maikov, and
      Taras Shevchenko.